Os jesuítas e a Escola Técnica de Eletrônica Francisco Moreira da Costa: das Constituições aos Regimentos Escolares

Abstract

The Technical School of Electronics Francisco Moreira da Costa (ETE FMC), in Santa Rita do Sapucaí, Minas Gerais, was the first high school institution of Electronics in Latin America, and it was founded by Luzia Rennó Moreira, in 1959. Since then, it has remained under Jesuit direction. The humanist aspect of this leadership, however, has not aligned easily to an educational project that is more pragmatic, technical, and focused on reason—a contrast that was already pointed out during the times of Enlightenment and Pombaline Reforms, when Jesuit education was labelled as retrograde, bookish, academic, and not practical. The divergences between these two ways of conceiving education have motivated us to start doing this research. From a historical and cultural perspective, we compared the documented start of the Society of Jesus’s pedagogical endeavour, by consulting the Constitutions of 1558–1559, to the present time, mainly from regiments of ETE FMC that were published between 2010 and 2020. Also considering the documentary context, the intersection between these sources and specialised bibliography—in dialogue with Michel de Certeau’s philosophy and his concepts of “strategies” and “tactics”—, has led us to perceiving the stigmatised condition of technical or vocational education in Brazil. In a similar way, educational and social inequalities in different historical scenarios increased, since the vocational education was deficient, and access to universities was made difficult for the less privileged social classes, who could not benefit from the propaedeutic High School system (Ensino Médio). We linked the concept of strategies to the stigmatisation project, understanding that the action of the Jesuit direction at ETE FMC was set up as a tactical force. This leadership has adopted the following concepts found in the Constitutions, which affected the regiments that we analysed: adaptability to the circumstances, excellence in education, and integral formation. In this regard, we concluded that the Jesuit direction has contributed to the institution’s prominence for more than half a century, by breaking the unfortunate stigmatization project of technical and vocational education in Brazil. They have provided different social classes with the propaedeutic and technical education concomitantly: in other words, the Jesuit leadership has been offering consistent technical instruction, while also promoting access to higher education.